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User blog:Illumini9/Cleaned icons
A tutorial on how to create icons that are "cleaned"; that is, an icon that includes the full shape of the class indicator at the top-left, but also makes transparent everything unnecessary (like the stuff at the corners). See for example: Compare: Current trend seems to be going to gcwiki or seesaa wiki, saving the icons they have which usually haven't been cleaned, and then uploading it here. We could keep doing that, it's no skin off anyone's back if we do...but come on, that's got no style. Instructions 1. Take a screenshot of the in-game icon from the Unit Combination or Class Evolution screen. *These are the only place where the level info is stripped away and gives you the full view of the icon. In the Spirits' cases, the only place they won't show the multiplier is in the class-evolution screen, but the ones that this rule applies to should already have cleaned icons by the time anyone else starts doing this as a habit and you won't have to worry about them. Hopefully. *Try to make it so that the unit whose icon you want to clean is on the first combination slot. The others seem to do weird stuff; the bottom two sometimes adds an extra layer of white to the top of the icon, while the second material spot is too close to the arrow pointing to the right and part of the arrow will overlap with the icon. Either way, just make sure that the icon gets a full, unimpeded view in the screenshot. *If you have a program or something that automatically saves your screenshots, skip the next step. 2. Open up a picture editing software such as Paint.NET, GIMP (these two are freeware), or Adobe Photoshop (this is paid software) and paste your screenshot. *You can take the opportunity to save the picture as a PNG now, if your computer doesn't do that automatically. *If you're saving the picture, I believe Microsoft Paint would work for that as well, though it'll be useless for the next steps. 3. In the picture editing software (or in a'' picture editing software, if you skipped step 2), use the magic wand tool to select all the blue (or red, if you used the class-evolution screen) part of the screen around the icon and delete it. *Tolerance of about 34% seems to be the upper limit; if you want to play it safe, do it below that, since the extra pixels will have to be erased by the eraser tool later anyway. 4. (Optional) Select the area around the icon, cut it out, then paste it onto a new window. You don't really have to do this since you're cropping in the next step anyway, but I like to do it since it lets the screen look neater. 5. Crop the picture on all sides right up to the very edges of the icon. *The bottom and the right sides, you'll crop right up to the outside of the borders, but for the top and the left sides you have to make sure not to cut off part of the class' icon. *You should end up with something around 105x103px, though some class icons like the Samurais' won't stick out as much so you'll end up with 104x102px. 6. Use the eraser tool to take out the last traces of red, blue, white or gray in the corners (and make sure there's no residual transparent pixel when you're done). *Usually you can see that the corners all should all have the same pattern, which is the clearest at the bottom-right and bottom-left. 7. File -> Save As, save your icon (as a PNG, don't forget), (with the proper name - Rosalie Icon.png, for example, with the right capitals), and you're done! Extra Credit 1. Thanks to User:Kasarn for the tip - using pngout will optimize your picture's filesize to the minimum possible. *(In his words, "Quick pngout tutorial if you don't already use it: download the command line version and drag the image file onto the executable... and that should be it. Without a batch file, it'll only handle one file at a time though.") 2. Once uploaded or during uploading, categorize it in Category:Character icons (or if it's not an icon, wherever it's proper) and add to the page. *(The former's an organization thing, the latter I consider a just-in-case thing). 3. Also once uploaded or during uploading, add the following if you've done them: "cleaned", "optimized". If you can, please count the pixels of the class icon on the character's icon that stick out from its rarity border - for example, Rosalie's Soldier icon has 6 at the left and 5 at the top - and write them down like so: "Margins left:-6px, top:-5px". *This will help once Kasarn's Align icon template is implemented in the wiki proper, so that the template will now how many pixels to adjust alignment by. (See File:Rosalie Icon.png for an example of the above two points.) Notes *PNG is what's called a lossless file format. Its quality doesn't degrade on matter how much copying, saving, editing, and/or publishing is done. JPG/JPEG, while smaller in file size, '''is' a lossy format, so generally if a picture isn't one-use (like the stuff I have on this page) it's preferred to have pictures in PNG rather than JPG. (Wikipedia has a picture demonstrating this right here.)